Free God Is Red by Liao Yiwu

churches already followed the principles of self-governance, self-propagation and self-support. In Dali, we also established the Three-Self Patriotic Committee. Reverend Duan Liben was the director. I supported the tenets laid out in the Bible.
    Liao: Did you openly state that position in the Mao era?
    Wu: Oh, I wouldn’t dare. In 1952 the Dali United Front Department ordered Christian churches of different denominations to merge. We had the Catholic Church, the Episcopalian Church, and the Old City Church. We held services together until the political campaigns became really bad. The revolutionary masses had been mobilized to attack Christians. The slogan was “hurting their flesh to change their souls.” As a result, people left the church in droves. In the end, the only open Christians in Dali were Reverend Hou Wuling and his wife, Li Quanben, and Yang Fengzhen . . .
    Liao: What happened to them?
    Wu: They all died tragically. Reverend Hou Wuling had been publicly denounced several times. He died during a public study session, an aneurism . . . but please, let’s not talk about him. It breaks my heart to even think about it.
    Before the Cultural Revolution ended, all open religious activities had been banned. Churches and church assets had been seized. Only in silence could people pray and read Scripture. It was a treat just to move our lips and shape the name of God.
    I couldn’t bring myself to openly boycott the government policies. I didn’t dare reveal my true faith in public. When I realized that I couldn’t do it, I asked God for forgiveness. Thanks to the merciful Lord, I was able to survive the political campaigns of the 1950s.
    Liao: Did you suffer during the Cultural Revolution?
    Wu: The Red Guards wanted to sweep away all sorts of “snakes and demons.” My wife and I couldn’t escape. Our home was ransacked; we were interrogated. They put dunce caps on us and paraded us through the streets. They burned our precious collections of biblical books. Oh, so sad . . . but the past is like passing clouds. I just let it go.
    [Zhang Fengxiang, seeing how affected her husband was, intervened at this point in the interview and offered to continue his story. “The past is too traumatic for my husband,” she said. “He doesn’t want to revisit it, especially after his stroke.”]
    Zhang Fengxiang: I was born into a poor family in 1933 in the city of Chuxiong, Yunnan province. There was a Bethel Church near my home. When I was five, I began joining many children in the neighborhood to attend free classes at the church. Our teachers were foreigners with blue eyes and big noses. They smiled all the time and were very patient. They taught us how to read and write in English. Then we learned to pray and sing hymns. A few years later, we started learning Bible stories. I loved going to the classes because the teachers would distribute candies and toys to us if we came up with the right answers to their questions. Under their influence, I became a Christian and was baptized at the age of fifteen. In 1950 I was enrolled in a nursing school affiliated with the Christian hospital in Dali and became a nurse after graduation. In 1953, when I was twenty, I married Wu Yongsheng in a local church. We both worked at the same hospital.
    At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, we became the primary targets at the hospital. We suffered all sorts of tortures. The Maoist rebels accused us of being spies. They gathered all of us in front of our church, beating drums and gongs, and sang revolutionary songs. They held a public denunciation meeting there. First they piled up all the biblical books and documents, and then they set them on fire. They cheered and danced. Several Christians, including my husband and I, were forced to bend down at a ninety-degree angle by the fire.
    They were still not satisfied. They smashed the windows, the pews, the bookshelves, the